My dear friend,
Your obliged and very affectionate friend,
S. T. Coleridge
T. Allsop, Esq.[117]
Coleridge’s animadversions on Scott’s work are not justifiable. Although Sir Walter’s poetry is not to be compared for literary technique to that of Coleridge, it has a merit not unlike some parts of Coleridge’s own. Sir Walter may be designated the Poet of Romantic Association; much of his poetry is founded on the associations of localities celebrated in history. The Second Part of Christabel and the Knight’s Tomb are clearly of this genre of poetry. A touch of jealousy of the success of Scott seems to enter into Coleridge’s estimate of his brother poet. His criticism of the novels is of less importance; for Coleridge was always hostile to the novel as enticing men away from serious study and reading.]
CHAPTER XXV
HENRY CRABB ROBINSON
[Among the men who met Coleridge, and recorded their impressions of his talk, Henry Crabb Robinson occupies a prominent place. He was one of the leading genius tasters of the time, and made pilgrimages to great living men in place of visiting the relics of departed worth or the shrines of the saints, which serves with others the same purpose. He thus came into contact with as wide a circle of intellectuality as any man of his day, his list including Goethe, Schiller, Wieland, and many of the Germans, Madame De Staël, Wordsworth, Lamb, and a host of others well known to readers of his lively Diary. Henry Crabb Robinson met Coleridge for the first time in 1810 at Lamb’s, and was at once smitten with Coleridge’s talk. He met him several times in the first month of their acquaintanceship, and one of his entries in the Diary reads—“Coleridge kept me on the stretch of attention and admiration from half past three to twelve o’clock.” But for a long time Robinson did not rank Coleridge as high as Wordsworth, with whom he had been familiar before meeting the former, and he was rather surprised when Lamb put Coleridge above the poet of Rydal (Diary, i, 319).
Robinson frequently visited Coleridge at Highgate. Indeed he was among the first of Coleridge’s acquaintances to be asked to dine at the Grove. On 17th June 1817 we find Coleridge asking him to make an appointment so that he might bring Ludwig Tieck with him to meet John Hookham Frere (Letters, 671). He induces him to come to Highgate to have a walk or drive “in Caen Wood and its delicious groves and alleys (the finest in England), a grand Cathedral aisle of giant lime-trees, Pope’s favourite composition walk when with the old Earl, a brother rogue of yours in the law line.” He informs Robinson that he has read two pages of Lallah Rookh, which he pronounces “Crockery-ware!”
The following is a specimen of the many entries in the Diary—“December 24, 1822. This afternoon I spent at Aders.[118] A large party—a splendid dinner, prepared by a French cook; and music in the evening. Coleridge was the star of the evening. He talked in his usual way, though with more liberality than when I saw him last some years ago. But he was somewhat less animated and brilliant and paradoxical. The music was enjoyed by Coleridge, but I could have dispensed with it for the sake of his conversation” (Diary, ii, 239).